David Beech • Senior Lecturer BA Fine Art• Chelsea College of Art & Design.
Dave Beech is an artist in the collective Freee. He teaches at Chelsea College of Art and writes for Art Monthly. He has recently published two books, ‘Beauty’ for Whitechapel/MIT and ‘Art and Text’ for Black Dog Publishing.

Lewis Biggs • Director • Liverpool Biennial.
Since November 2000, Lewis Biggs has been Chief Executive and Artistic Director of Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art. The 2002 festival ‘broke the rules’ by focusing on newly commissioned art, much of it for the public realm, researched collaboratively and realised by a team of locally based curators. The success of this festival and its unique configuration, established Liverpool Biennial as a significant contributor to the international spectrum of biennales.

Since then, Lewis has led the company to become one of the UK’s leading art commissioning agencies working in the public realm, dedicated to ‘engaging art, people and place’. From 1979 to 1990 (at Arnolfini, Bristol; with the British Council and at Tate Liverpool) Lewis concentrated on exhibitions of British sculpture, sometimes placed in public space. He was Director of Tate Liverpool from 1990 to 2000, and it was as joint Curator / Director of Art Transpennine 98 that his focus moved decisively beyond the museum / gallery context.

Simon Bill • Artist.
Simon Bill is a painter, writer, and, on one occasion, a curator. Born in Kingston on Thames in 1958 he was educated at St Martins (as it then was) and The Royal College of Art. He has shown widely and been represented by three galleries to date: the first of these was Cabinet Gallery, from 1992 to 1999, then by Stuart Shave/Modern Art from 1999 until 2007. He is currently with LA gallery Patrick Painter with whom he has had two solo shows, the most recent of these in Dec 2008. His writing has included catalogue essays for Gary Hume and Gavin Turk and an unpublished novel. His single venture as a curator was the V22 organised 'The Sculpture Show' co-curated with Cedric Christie in 2008. He is currently doing a PhD at Kingston University about visual art and the neuropsychology of vision.

Dr. Jonathan Black • Sr. Research Fellow • Kingston University.
Jonathan Black was educated at St. John’s College Cambridge and University College London. In 2003 he was awarded a PhD in History of Art by the University of London for his thesis on the image of the British soldier in the First World War graphic art and sculpture of: C.R.W. Nevinson; Eric Kennington and Charles Sargeant Jagger c.1915-1925.

He is currently Senior Research Fellow in History of Art at Dorich House Museum, Kingston University. The Museum is the former home of sculptor Dora Gordine (1895-1991). Recent publications include: Subtlety and Strength: The Drawings of Dora Gordine (London, 2009); the monograph Dora Gordine: Sculptor, Artist, Designer (London, 2008); an essay on Gaudier-Brzeska and WWI in We The Moderns: Gaudier-Brzeska and the Birth of Modern Sculpture, ed. S. Barassi (Cambridge UK, 2007); the monograph Form, Felling and Calculation: The Complete Paintings and Drawings of Edward Wadsworth (London, 2005) and The Sculpture of Eric Kennington (London, 2002).

Charlotte Cohen • Regional Fine Arts Officer • US General Service Administration.
Charlotte Cohen is a Fine Arts Officer for the U.S. General Services Administration where she manages both new art commissions at federal buildings, as well as the fine arts collection, in the New York region. She is the former director of the New York City Percent for Art Program, prior to which she worked at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Charlotte has lectured extensively about public art in the United States and abroad. She curated a group of public art artists and experts who visited Russia to lecture and initiate public art projects, and co-founded a public art program at the University of Belgrade in Serbia. Charlotte is an adjunct faculty member at New York University and a member of the Public Art Network Council (PAN).

Susan Collins • Artist / Reader in Fine Art, Slade School of Fine Art, UniversityCollegeLondon.
Susan Collins is one of the UK’s leading artists working with digital media. She exhibits extensively internationally traversing public, gallery and online spaces, with her recent works employing transmission, networking, light and time as primary materials. Key works include the bafta nominated Tate in Space; Transporting Skies - a live video relay of sky between Penzance and Sheffield; The Spectrascope, an ongoing pixel by pixel transmission from a haunted house; and the Fenlandia/Glenlandia series, an exploration into time, technology and landscape .

Public commissions include a collaboration with Sarah Wigglesworth Architects on a RIBA award winning Classroom of the Future; Underglow, a network of illuminated drains in London, and Chaser, a temporary lighting commission for Tyne Bridge Tower, Newcastle. In 2009 Collins completed a major solo exhibition, website and book, Seascape, co-commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella and the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea.

Collins is Reader in Fine Art and Director of the Slade Centre for Electronic Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. http://www.susan-collins.net.

Nick De Ville • Millard Chair • Goldsmiths, University of London. Nick de Ville is the Millard Professor for Research in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been involved in the teaching of art at Goldsmiths for many years, previously running the innovative Practice-led PhD programme in Fine Art, and was the head of the Department from 1987 to 1997. Throughout his academic career he has worked an artist, writer and curator. The focus of his research is contemporary art, and its relation to the wider culture. He is currently writing about the three-way relation between art practice, ‘folk art’ (self-identifying, dissenting constituencies) and design in an increasingly urban, built environment where design is becoming an evermore significant cultural discourse. A further research interest is the two-way influence between pedagogy and contemporary art practice, and their mutual development in the modern period.

Mark Dunhill • Dean, School Art • Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.
Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien have been working collaboratively since 1998. They have exhibited in galleries and project spaces in the UK, Ireland, Holland, Italy and Japan and have undertaken residencies at the British School at Rome, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo and the European Ceramic Work Centre, s’Hertogenbosch, Holland. Their collaboration sets out to establish a method for making Sculpture unhampered by the burden of taste or the ‘hand of the artist’. This quest has so far led them to devise elaborate strategies employing motorised components, chance, tailor made tools and groups of participants.

Dunhill and O’Brien edit and direct the research portal: www.collabarts.org focusing on collaborative art practice through a collection of essays, links and other resources. Mark Dunhill graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1977. He is currently Dean of Art at Central Saint Martins, London (University of the Arts London). Tamiko O’Brien graduated with an MA in Sculpture from Chelsea College of Art in 1988. She is currently Associate Dean of College at Camberwell College of Art (University of the Arts London).

Janet Echelman • Artist and Writer.
Janet Echelman is an artist who reshapes urban airspace with monumental fluidly-moving sculpture that is choreographed by nature. "My sculpture thrives in the context of the city, interacting with people in the course of their daily lives. I make living, breathing pieces that respond to the forces of nature — wind, light, water." The artist premiers Water Sky Garden at the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games located at the Richmond Olympic Oval. She recently completed the new 145-foot-tall civic icon for Phoenix, Arizona, Her Secret is Patience. Her sculpture, She Changes, a 160-foot-tall waterfront netted wind sculpture suspended above a 3-lane highway roundabout in Portugal, was called “one of the truly significant public artworks in recent years” by Sculpture magazine. After graduating from Harvard College in 1987 with Highest Honors in Visual Studies, she received graduate degrees in Painting and in Psychology. From 1988-1993, Janet lived as an artist on Bali, Indonesia, before moving her studio to New York City. In 2007, she moved to Brookline, Massachusetts to begin the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University GSD.

Robert Ferry RA • Principal • Land Art Generator Initiative.
Robert Ferry is a licensed architect and interdisciplinary artist currently working on various projects in the Middle East. His architectural focus is on designing buildings and other public objects that go above and beyond current popular notions of sustainability to achieve complete harmony with their local and global environments and with the people that use them. While based in the UAE, he has been consulting on such projects as MASDAR City, Abu Dhabi, which is setting new standards of low-impact urban design. He is the designer of the Almeisan Tower for Dubai, a less-than-zero-impact observation tower that doubles as a renewable energy power-plant.

He and his wife, Elizabeth Monoian (Assistant Professor of Visual Communications at the American University in Dubai), work collaboratively on numerous creative projects, the most notable of which is the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI)—a landmark initiative bringing together artists, architects, scientists, and engineers to design and construct public art installations that uniquely combine aesthetics with clean energy
generation.

Peter Fink • Artist

.
Peter was born in London and brought up in USA and Czechoslovakia where he graduated in Engineering in 1968. In 1969 he returned to live permanently in the UK graduating in Sculpture at St. Martins School of Art in 1973 and in Philosophy at University College London in 1978. In 1990 he founded Art2Architecture focused on collaborative projects between artists and architects. As an artist Peter realized a wide range of public art projects and installations frequently combining art, lighting, architecture, urbanism and ecology, as well as co-writing several seminal books on the topic of Public Art and Architecture. In 2006 he became a founding partner of FoRM Associates a place making company responsible for many award winning projects worldwide.

Peter’s keen interest in architecture has also extended into teaching as a Unit Master at the Architectural Association and as a Dissertation Master at the Bartlett Institute school of Architecture as well as his work as an enabler for CABE Space.

Joel Fisher • Research Coordinator STONEProject • Edinburgh College of Art.
Joel Fisher is a sculptor who in interested in the conceptual as well as the material aspects of sculpture. For the past three years he has been involved with STONEproject, an international research project that is documenting stone working techniques worldwide. STONEproject's further goals are to articulate subtractive verses additive ways of thinking, tacit skills, the nature of tools, and the challenge of tactility. During this conference Fisher will propose a connection between sculpture and education. In order to understanding sculpture, in contrast to painting, it is necessary for the viewer to assess the work from multiple vantage points. A single point of view is never sufficient. This comprehensive understanding, in addition to the fact that neither sculpture nor education takes place at a single moment in time, suggests that if we take sculpture as a structural model for education we might restore some of the advantages that were once found in the model of 'Liberal Arts.'

Bill FitzGibbons • Executive Director and Artist • Blue Star Contemporary Art Center. Bill FitzGibbons received his BFA in Sculpture and Art History from the University of Tennessee, and his MFA in Sculpture and Multi-Media from Washington University in St. Louis. Bill has received over thirty public art commissions in five countries. In 1979 he became the first curator at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri. From 1985 until 1988 he was appointed as the Director of Sculpture at the Visual Art Center in Anchorage, Alaska. In 1988 he became the Department Head of Sculpture at the San Antonio Art Institute. In 1991 he was selected as a Fulbright Scholar for the Hungarian Art Academy in Budapest, Hungary. Bill has served on the adjunct faculty at Trinity University in San Antonio and has been the Executive Director of the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center since the summer of 2002. Currently Bill serves on the board of directors of the International Sculpture Center. Bill recently installed Öndvegissúlur, Poem of Light, an LED light sculpture on the façade of the Reykjavik City Hall in Iceland for the opening of Museum Night.

Chris Fremantle • Producer and Research Associate •The Robert Gordon University.
Chris Fremantle is a researcher and producer working with artists, working in public. He is currently managing public art programmes for two new NHS Hospitals in Glasgow. He worked with Helen Mayer Harrison, Newton Harrison and their Associate David Haley on Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2006-2008) which toured to London and New York. He worked with PLATFORM, the interdisciplinary social and ecological practice, on their project Remember Saro-Wiwa (2006-2008). He has been involved with On The Edge Research at Gray's School of Art for ten years, recently as Research Associate on The Artist as Leader (2006-2009).

He was Director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (1997-2003) where, amongst many projects, he produced Boundaries, a iron casting performance by George Beasley and Helen Denerley, broadcast live by the BBC from Strathdon in Scotland to the 2001 ISC Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. During that period he also produced Place of Origin, a 10 year landscape project at Kemnay Quarry undertaken by John Maine, Glen Onwin and Brad Goldberg. He is a member of the executive of the Scottish Artists Union.

Moira Marti Geoffrion • Professor of Art and Distinguished Faculty Fellow • University of Arizona.Professor of Art and Distinguished Faculty Fellow, University of Arizona, her sculpture and mixed media installations have been exhibited in galleries and museums in US and in Europe, Australia, Mexico, and Africa. She was featured artist in art festivals in Bulgaria and is working on public art installations for parks, neighborhoods, and public transit locations. She was resident artist in Zurich, Switzerland; Perth, Australia and several U.S. locations and in art research tours in India, Sierra Leone and Malawi. Her work has been shown in 36 solo exhibitions and 190 group shows.

Geoffrion has been represented by Sonia Zaks Gallery, Chicago; and currently by Mark Sublett Modern Gallery, and Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson, AZ. She was featured at BIS Altes Musuem, Germany and at the Municipal Museum of Art, Gyor, Hungary.

Geoffrion received the J. B. Anthony Outstanding Teaching Award, University of Arizona and grants to research and present her work, which has been reviewed in noted arts magazines. BFA, Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts. MFA, Southern Illinois University.

Bruce Gernand • Research Fellow • Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design.
3D digital modelling has been a feature in Bruce Gernand’s work for the past ten years. A large scale sculpture, “Star and Cloud”, was commissioned by the Cass Sculpture Foundation in 1999 from his first rapid prototype model. In addition to using RP technology, Gernand has developed craft based techniques for outputting digital forms. His consistent concern has been to ground the digital in the material and to look for reciprocities, ways of encompassing implicit polarities between the virtual and the actual. Gernand has been in receipt of awards from the AHRC and Arts Council England to explore this area. Much of the activity is undertaken through residencies at such institutions as the European Ceramics Workcentre (EKWC) in Holland. Formerly Head of Sculpture at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Gernand is currently a Research Fellow there.

Recently, he participated in “The Personalised Surface” research project, through FADE (Fine Art Digital Environment) at the University of the Arts London and showed the sculptures at the ICA, London, and delivered a conference paper at the V&A Museum.

Antony Gormley. Born and raised in North London, Antony Gormley studied Archaeology, Anthropology and Art History at Trinity College, Cambridge, before traveling to India and Sri Lanka where he studied Buddhist meditation. These experiences influenced his work, beginning with representations of the human body embodying moments in time, and later exploring the realm of how one’s self relates to others. Many of his sculptural works are made with, or based on, molds taken from his own body. Gormley’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows throughout the UK in venues such as the Whitechapel, Tate, Hayward galleries, the British Museum and White Cube. His work has been exhibited internationally at museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, Malmö Konsthall, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999.

Ian Hunter • Artist/Director.
Trained as a sculptor in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. Curator and Acting Director with the National Art Gallery in New Zealand until 1980. Was a Humanities Fellow at Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, 1975 - 77 and later completed a Fine Art PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1992. In the early 1980s established the ANZART Australia/New Zealand artist exchanges, and later employed as Arts Officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties until 1984. Came to live in the North West England in 1986 on a pioneering artist residency with Rossendale Groundwork Trust. In 1989-90 established Littoral Arts as an arts trust working for social and environmental change. Currently working on a project to restore Kurt Schwitters' last Merzbau; the Elterwater Merz Barn in Cumbria. <www.merzbarn.net> <www.littoral.org.uk>

Brigitte Jurack • Sr. Lecturer • Manchester Metropolitan University.
Brigitte Jurack has exhibited internationally and is a co-founder of acclaimed artists’ group Foreign Investment. Jurack’s sculptures and installations celebrate the overlooked and marginalised. Her publication Irfaran (travel and work) focuses on peripheral architecture in the context of urban regeneration, tourism and the artist as international globetrotter. The accompanying collection of haunting memorial sculptures was exhibited at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the Liverpool Biennial. Recent group exhibitions include E:vent Gallery, London, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kiev.

After studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Jurack moved to the United Kingdom in 1989 and has lectured at Derby University, Liverpool Art School, Newcastle University and Manchester Art School where she is Senior Lecturer in Sculpture. A past holder of the Henry Moore Sculpture Fellowship and North East Visual Arts Fellowship, she has received grants to work with the European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands, Braziers International Artists’ Workshop and the Third World Water Conference in Kyoto. Brigitte Jurack has been selected for one of eight International Artist Residencies at the Irish Museum of Modern Art during 2010.

Elaine A. King • Professor and Critic • Carnegie Mellon University.
Elaine A. King is a Professor of the History of Art/theory/Museum Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. She holds an Interdisciplinary PhD in Art History and Theory from Northwestern University. King’s concentration is Post-1945 American Art. King’s previous positions have included: Senior Research Fellow, Smithsonian American Art Museum; research fellowship , National Portrait Gallery ; Executive Director/Chief Curator, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Director/Curator of the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery; and research fellow, Central Cultural European Institute. King has organized over 25 one-person exhibitions/ catalogues and 30 thematic exhibitions. She writes for Sculpture, Art on Paper, Grapheion, Art News and the Washington Post, and co-edited Ethics and the Visual. King was a guest curator for the Hungarian Graphic Arts Biennial, a juror for the 2001 Prague Triennial, and nominator for the USA pavilion for the Venice Biennale. Acknowledgements include an IREX grant and being selected as American University’s Distinguished Art Historian in Italy. King is a member of the Association of International Art Critics and regularly gives papers at international congresses.

Vivien Lovell • Founder • Modus Operandi Art Consultants.
Vivien Lovell is a visual arts curator with expertise in commissioning permanent and temporary art within the designed environment. She founded Modus Operandi in 1999 as an independent consultancy, having previously been Founder-Director of Public Art Commissions Agency (PACA) from 1987 to 1999.

Carole Anne Meehan • Senior Project Manager and Curator• Houston Arts Alliance.
Carole Anne Meehan has over twenty years’ experience creating exhibitions and public art. She is currently a Senior Project Manager and Curator with the Houston Arts Alliance in Texas where she is developing major outdoor projects with Dennis Oppenheim and Jaume Plensa. From 2006 to 2008 she was Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, where she directed ICA/Vita Brevis from 1998 to 2007, commissioning 26 temporary works for public and historic sites that included new projects by Julian Opie, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Olafur Eliasson, Cornelia Parker, Nari Ward, and Allora + Calzadilla. Meehan’s Art on the Harbor Islands, engaging Boston’s harbor, islands, and the new ICA designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, received “Best Exhibition in a Public Place” by the International Association of Art Critics/New England in 2007. With ICA Director Jill Medevedow, Meehan co-edited Vita Brevis: History, Landscape and Art (Steidl, 2004). From 1992 – 1997 she directed Visual Arts at the Boston Center for the Arts, creating dozens of exhibitions and site-specific projects.

Peter Noever •Designer, C.E.O. and Artistic Director MAK Vienna/Los Angeles. Designer. Since 1986 C.E.O. and Artistic Director of the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna. 1988–1993 initiator and artistic director of the general adaptation of the MAK entrusting 13 contemporary artists with the redesign of the MAK Permanent Collection. Interventions in the building’s structure (James Wines/SITE’s “Gate to the Ring”, James Turrell’s “MAKLite”, Walter Pichler’s “Gate to the Garden”) and launching art in the public realm (Franz West, Donald Judd, Philip Johnson, Michael Kienzer). 1994 foundation of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles. 2006 foundation of the Josef Hoffmann Museum, Brtnice, a joint branch of the Moravian Gallery in Brno and the MAK Vienna. 2008 acceptance of the Fitzpatrick-Leland House (a Donation by Russ Leland) and foundation of the MAK UFI – Urban Future Initiative, Los Angeles.

1975–1993 lecturer of Design Analysis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. 1989 guest professor for Museology at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. 1982–1994 publisher and editor-in-chief of UMRISS, the magazine for architecture.

Realized and is continuously working on various architectural projects, such as the land art intervention “The Pit” in Breitenbrunn/Burgenland (1971–today), the design for the MAK Terrace Plateau in the MAK Garden (1989/1993), CAT – Contemporary Art Tower / The 21 st Century Collection together with Sepp Müller and Michael Embacher (1989), the Havana Project (with Carl Pruscha) in the capacity of the urban planning consultant for the Cuban Ministry of Culture and the UNESCO (1995), and “MAK über Wien. Reparatur, Intervention und Erweiterung” together with Embacher/Wien (2009), a feasibility study defining the changed requirement profile of the museum and proposing concrete agendas for the public realm.

Peter Noever is curator and exhibition designer in Vienna, Los Angeles, and abroad; he realized numerous exhibitions on art and architecture as well as exhibitions of his own architecture and design works in Europe, the US and Asia. He realized various product designs and developed ground-breaking design strategies. Lives and works in Vienna.

Tamiko O'Brien • Acting Head of School of Fine Art, Wimbledon.
Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien have been working collaboratively since 1998. They have exhibited in galleries and project spaces in the UK, Ireland, Holland, Italy and Japan and have undertaken residencies at the British School at Rome, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo and the European Ceramic Work Centre, s’Hertogenbosch, Holland. Their collaboration sets out to establish a method for making Sculpture unhampered by the burden of taste or the ‘hand of the artist’. This quest has so far led them to devise elaborate strategies employing motorised components, chance, tailor made tools and groups of participants.

Dunhill and O’Brien edit and direct the research portal: www.collabarts.org focusing on collaborative art practice through a collection of essays, links and other resources. Mark Dunhill graduated with an MA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art in 1977. He is currently Dean of Art at Central Saint Martins, London (University of the Arts London). Tamiko O’Brien graduated with an MA in Sculpture from Chelsea College of Art in 1988. She is currently Associate Dean of College at Camberwell College of Art (University of the Arts London).

Laurie Peake • Programme Director for Public Art • Liverpool Biennial.
Laurie Peake is Programme Director for Public Art at Liverpool Biennial, working in collaboration with partners to deliver transformational commissions in public spaces across Merseyside. Past projects include Jaume Plensa’s Dream in St Helens, Richard Wilson’s Turning the Place Over in Liverpool and Antony Gormley’s installation Another Place on Crosby Beach. Current projects include a series of commissions in development with New Heartlands, the Housing Market Renewal initiative on Merseyside.

Laurie has spent over two decades facilitating collaborations between artists and public in the context of urban regeneration at Tate Gallery in London and Liverpool, at Camden Arts Centre, and Arts Council England. Laurie came to Liverpool Biennial from Alsop Architects where she worked with their urba

n visioning team on regeneration projects across the north of England. She is currently a member of the Advisory Panel of Places Matter!, the Architecture and Built Environment Centre formed to drive up the quality of place making in the Northwest.

Dr. Helen Pheby • Curator • Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Dr Helen Pheby is Curator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, an international centre for modern and contemporary art set in 500 acres of historic parkland with five galleries. YSP curates a changing programme alongside permanent site-specific commissions, most recently by James Turrell and Andy Goldsworthy. In addition to coordinating major YSP exhibitions, such as Isamu Noguchi in 2009, and developing new work with mid-career and emerging artists, Helen curates offsite and overseas projects.

Helen’s PhD thesis examined case-studies of international public art in relation to audiences, engagement and rehabilitation of places; she now works with communities worldwide. She curated the public artworks Cratehouse for Castleford by Winter/Hörbelt and Carlos Garaicoa’s ongoing project The Observatory as part of a culture-led regeneration in the town. She works with ArtRole to facilitate cultural exchange with Kurdistan-Iraq and is a curatorial adviser of BECA: Bridge for Emerging Contemporary in New Orleans. Helen is most recently published as a contributor to the book Museums Materialities (Routledge, 2009). She is a trustee of ArtGene, Cumbria, and The Civic in Barnsley.

John Roloff • Chairperson, Sculpture/Ceramics• San Francisco Art Institute.
John Roloff is a visual artist who works conceptually with site, process and natural systems. He is known primarily for his outdoor kiln/furnace projects done from the late 1970’s to the early 1990’s as well as other large-scale environmental and gallery installations. Based on a background in science, his work engages poetic and site-specific relationships between material, concept and performance in the domains of geology, ecology, architecture, ceramics, industry and mining, metabolic systems and history. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, UC Berkeley Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Institution, Photoscene Cologne and the Venice Architectural and Art Biennales and most recently The Snow Show in Kemi, Finland. He has received 3 artist’s visual arts fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a California Arts Council grant and a Bernard Osher Fellowship at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco. He is currently Chair of the Sculpture/Ceramics Department the San Francisco Art Institute. More information is available at www.johnroloff.com.

Shelly Shaw • Curator, Art on the Underground. Bio coming soon.

Melissa Shiff • Visual Artist and Adjunct Professor • University of Toronto.
Melissa Shiff is an Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She specializes in video sculpture, performance, and installation art and her work engages such themes as animating the archive, cultural memory, repurposing museum collections, and exploring the relationship between religious ritual and performance art.

Her highly acclaimed video sculpture ARK was the keynote project for the Jewish Museum in Prague's centennial year celebration in 2006. ARKthinks about the museum as ark and archive. Bruce Jenkins (Dean, School of the Art Institute, Chicago) wrote that with ARK “ Shiff joins media artists, Bill Viola and Mary Lucier, Beryl Korot and Chantal Akerman, who have placed this contemporary form of the moving-image arts in the service of probing the past.”

Her video sculpture Elijah Chair is in the permanent collection of The Jewish Museum New York where she has been featured in three exhibitions in the past five years. Her work has been exhibited in museums around the world including Israel, United Kingdom, United States, and the Czech Republic.

Joan Truckenbrod • Professor • School of the Art Institute Chicago.
Joan Truckenbrod creates sculpture with a variety of materials, enlivened by video. Her work is inspired by transformative processes occurring in nature. These become mapped onto forms she creates, embedded with social architectures. She exhibits her artwork internationally. A number of collections, including the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, include her work. She has received a Scandinavian American Foundation Fellowship, a Special Assistance Grant from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Fulbright Fellowship. After completing an Artist's Residency at Kala Institute in Berkeley California she was awarded a commission for a public art project along the River Walk in Green Bay Wisconsin.

Her artwork has appeared in a number of books and periodicals. In 2007 Sculpturemagazine included an article about her video/multimedia installations, and earlier, one of her exhibitions in Chicago was reviewed in ARTnews. A book about her artwork titled Portfolio: Joan Truckenbrod has been published by Telos Publishing. Joan Truckenbrod is a professor in the Art and Technology Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Rachel Withers• Art Critic •Wimbledon College of Arts. Rachel Withers holds degrees in the History of European Art and Architecture (Courtauld Institute of Art) and in Fine Art and Critical Practice ( Central St. Martin’s). Since the later 1990s her writing has appeared in many publications, including the Guardian, New Statesman, Frieze, Nu (the Nordic Art Review) and the Nordic daily Aftonbladet, and she is a frequent contributor to Artforum International. She has scripted catalogue essays and other texts for a wide variety of exhibitions and institutions, including the Venice and Sydney Biennales and the Tate. Her monograph on the Swiss artist Roman Signer was published by Dumont in 2007. Withers lectures in critical practice in the School of Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art.

Jon Wood • Research Coordinator and Art Historian•Henry Moore Institute.
Dr Jon Wood studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art and works at the Henry Moore Institute where he coordinates the research programme and curates exhibitions. He is also an Associate Lecturer at Leeds University, where he teaches on the MA in Art History. He has published widely on twentieth century sculpture (particularly on the work of Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein, Moore, Giacometti and Picasso) and on contemporary sculpture (notably on the work of Cragg, Woodrow, Vermeiren, Barlow, Locke, De Cock and Monk). Recent publications include: Modern Sculpture Reader (2007), an anthology of twentieth-century writings on sculpture, with Alex Potts and David Hulks and Articulate Objects: Voice, Sculpture and Performance (2009), with Aura Satz. He was co-editor of the two volume publication Sculpture in 20 th century Britain (2003). Exhibitions and accompanying publications include: Box-Body-Burial: The Sculptural Imagination of Keith Arnatt (2009), Against Nature: the hybrid forms of modern sculpture (2008), Tony Cragg and F. X. Messerschmidt (2008), Freud's Sculpture (2006), With Hidden Noise: Sculpture, Video and Ventriloquism (2004), Shine: Sculpture and Surface in the 1920s and 1930s (2002) and Close Encounters: The Sculptor's Studio in the Age of the Camera (2001).